How to be spat out.

My Dad used to be a pipe smoker and gave it up after having a bad chest cold. The one thing that I recall quite clearly was the tobacco he used, and I recall the three varieties he favoured, there was Condor Long Cut, Condor Ready Rubbed and Clan – mainly because he sent me to the shop to get them (despite me being well underage). He always kept it in a leather pouch that was down the side of his seat in the front room. For some bizarre reason I occasionally took to opening the pouch up and smelling the contents inside and I must admit the aroma was something I found quite nice. Then one day I must have taken leave of my senses, probably after hearing that people chewed tobacco. I reasoned that if people chewed it and it smelt nice then it would probably taste nice too. For once the fact that we have a sense of smell to tell us whether something is fit to put in your mouth proved wrong! I picked out some of the tobacco and placed it in my mouth and began to chew! Well, the chewing didn’t last long, and I soon spat out this now viscous brown mush as my mouth was burning and the taste was foul!

This made me think of a time when we went to a church whilst we were away. Without naming names, it was not a specific denomination but the sort of church that has been used of God in the past. Call me old fashioned and out of touch but what we experienced amounted to very little other than a bit of a religious sing song followed by something that amounted to nothing more than a motivational talk – and not a very good one at that! There was no reading from scripture and only a brief reading of a verse from the New Testament, which was at the end, so if you’d dozed off early on you would have missed it altogether.

There was barely any mention of Jesus and certainly none about the redemptive work of the cross and the need of repentance. I certainly came away from there wondering how a non-believer who was weighed down by the burden of sin and in need of the message of hope that the message of the death and resurrection of Christ gives would have felt after hearing such insipid platitudes. When you compare this with the violent reactions the likes of Wesley and Booth received for preaching the gospel, then what was on offer here was as offensive as a visit to Waitrose! Basically, that’s what I’ll call it ‘Waitrose Christianity’ all very nice and middle class, very respectable but certainly not much of a challenge to those far from God.

Either this is a sign of my age or there is a deeper routed problem in some churches. This one we visited has always been big on the gifts of the spirit and from what I saw it would appear to be the result of worshipping the gifts and not the giver. What you have is nothing more than a Godless, Christless, and ultimately Hopeless message being preached (I shan’t use the word gospel as there was none!)

The thing is that over the past year we have seen the fruits of this especially in the celebrity pastor driven church that is Hillsong. Just let us be a people who are careful of falling into such a trap. It is just too easy to take our eyes away from God for too long and put other things in His place whether it be a pastor, preacher, gifting, church, ministry, or worship leader – the list is endless. I put my previous job in that category despite me kidding myself it was God’s work by dressing it up in Christian garb and when God took that idol away the pain was beyond description. However, His presence more than filled the void that was left, and the work of restoration is still in progress.

Now let me take you back to the story at the start. That tobacco had all the hallmarks of being something that was going to be pleasant once I put it in my mouth – that’s the thing with ‘Waitrose Christianity’ it looks all very nice and respectable and pleasing to the senses but ultimately it is something that God is, like the church in Laodicea (Revelation 3v16), going to spit from His mouth, which is a place that neither of us as individuals or as churches want to be in.